THE MORPHOLOGY OF SPEECH.
“In der Wirklichkeit wird die Rede nicht aus ihr
vorangegangenen Wörtern zusammengesetzt, sondern die Wörter
gehen umgekehrt aus dem ganzen der Rede hervor.”—W. VON
HUMBOLDT.
“Rien n’autorise donc à admettre deux moments dans la création
du langage: un premier moment, où il n’aurait eu que des
radicaux, à la manière chinoise, et un second moment, où il
serait arrivé à la grammaire.”—RENAN.
We have seen in an earlier chapter that the form under which our thought
may express itself in language is capable of many variations. The
minds of men and races are very various, and what may seem a perfectly
natural mode of thought and expression to one man may be wholly strange
and unnatural to another. It is as difficult for us to realize the
conception of the sentence formed by the Chinaman, as it is for the
Chinaman to realize ours. The world wears a different aspect to different
individuals, and the relation of the speaker to the things about him may
be regarded in widely different ways. Races start each with a peculiar
temperament and peculiar characteristics; indeed, it is just these
peculiarities that constitute what we call a race. And race peculiarities
become strengthened by time and tradition, by the continuous influence of
the circumstances which have at once created and fostered them. What may
have been only a tendency in the beginning becomes in the end a settled
and permanent feature; the germ develops into the full-grown organism,
and in the course of ages makes explicit all the possibilities that lie
implicit within it. The manifold races of mankind do not all think in the
same manner, and the divergent modes in which they think are reflected in
the languages they utter.
Hence it is that languages can be classed morphologically, that is,
according to the form assumed by the sentence. Here the sentence may
be built, as it were, around a verb, there any conception of a verb
may be absent; here its several parts may be regarded as so many
equipollent monads, set one against the other, there as interdependent
pieces of a Chinese puzzle which all fit into their appropriate places.
In one class of tongues the root may be monosyllabic, in another
polysyllabic; one language may interpose the stem between the root and
the grammatical suffix, another may know nothing of such an intermediary.
Morphologically, therefore, languages differ from each other in the
structure of the sentence and the grammatical relation of its parts.
Now we must not forget that the idea of race has not the same
signification for the glottologist that it has for the physiologist.
For the student of language it means an assemblage of psychological and
physiological peculiarities which are expressed in articulate speech.
For him the European Jew, who has no language but that of the country in
which he is settled, is a member of the European race; only the Jew whose
mother-tongue belongs to the Semitic stock can be reckoned a Semite. At
the outset, no doubt, race meant the same thing in both a glottological
and a physiological sense. The characteristics which reflected themselves
in language were characteristics of which the physiologist has to take
account. But the physiological races of the modern world are far more
mixed than the languages they speak; the physiologist has much more
difficulty in distinguishing his races than has the glottologist in
distinguishing his families of speech.
But, as elsewhere in nature, so, too, in the domain of language,
species passes gradually and insensibly into species, class into class.
The types remain clear and strongly-marked, but the dividing lines
between them are hard to draw. Around each type is grouped a large
assemblage of languages which stand at a perpetually widening distance
from it; on the one side the furthest member of the group almost loses
itself in the outlying member of another, while the most distant member
on the other side can with difficulty be distinguished from the most
distant member of a third group. Isolating Chinese presents the phænomena
of agglutination and even of inflection; the agglutinative Finnic
dialects approach so nearly to inflection that attempts have been made
to include them in the Aryan family; and English is in many respects
highly agglutinative and even polysynthetic, while the French _je vous
donne_ is almost as good an instance of incorporation as could be given
from Basque itself. But with all this gradual approximation the several
types of language still remain fixed and distinct. The Chinese in its
main features, in its bone and muscle, so to say, continues true to
its isolating type, just as Finnic continues true to its agglutinative
type, or French to its inflectional one. The greater or less departure
of a language from its primitive type is due to several causes. First
of all, race in language may become mixed just as much as race in
physiology. Contact between two languages produces not only mixture in
their vocabularies, but a mutual influence upon their phonology, and
even grammar as well. This is a point to which we shall have to return
hereafter. Few languages any more than races in the physiological sense
can have remained quite isolated during the long course of their history
or been preserved from contact with languages of an alien class. Then,
secondly, with all their differences the minds of most men are cast in
the same mould. Thought is one, as a philosopher has said, though the
forms under which it shows itself are infinitely various. Unity underlies
diversity, and this unity finds its expression in the tendency of all
languages to break away from their types and assume common forms. It
is true that a language cannot wholly break away from its type without
becoming another language, and so ceasing to exist; it is true, also,
that such a psychological change as would be implied by the occurrence is
almost inconceivable, and is certainly contrary to historical experience;
but nevertheless languages belonging to two different types may gradually
approach one another during the long ages of their development, and the
difficulty experienced by the student in deciding to which type they
belong may testify to the similarity of the intellectual outfit of all
mankind. Here, at any rate, we can discover a common origin, a common
descent for the manifold branches of the human family.
Schlegel’s attempt to divide languages morphologically has already been
described. He distinguished them primarily as inorganic and organic,
the first class including languages “with grammatical structure,”
like the Chinese, and languages with affixes, and the second class,
including the synthetic or ancient and analytic or modern dialects of the
inflectional tongues. Pott, following Wilhelm von Humboldt, established
the division which with various modifications is still upheld by most
linguistic students. According to this the languages of the world
fall into four groups, the polysynthetic (such as the Eskimaux or the
Mexican), the isolating (like the Chinese), the agglutinative (like the
Turkish), and the inflectional (like Sanskrit). The first group he terms
transnormal, the second two intra-normal, and the third alone normal.
Bopp falls back upon Schlegel’s classification, making but three kinds
of speech, the isolating with monosyllabic roots but “without organism,
without grammar;” the languages capable of composition, of which the
Indo-European form the highest type; and the Semitic languages which
denote the relations of grammar by internal vowel-change. Schleicher,
like Max Müller, discards the first or polysynthetic class of Humboldt
and Pott, while Max Müller acutely seeks historical support for the
threefold division by referring the isolating languages to races which
have not risen above family-life, the agglutinative to nomad tribes, and
the inflectional to peoples who have arrived at the conception of the
state.
All these divisions, so far as they are founded in fact, are really
based, not on the word, but on the sentence, and only have a meaning
if we explain them as representing the different forms under which the
sentence has been conceived by the various races of mankind. To speak of
Chinese being “without grammar,” as Bopp does, or to describe the larger
number of languages as inorganic or other than normal, like Schlegel and
Pott, is simply self-contradictory. Every morphological classification
of language must be founded on grammar—that is, on the relations of the
several parts of the sentence to one another; and the very existence of a
class implies that it has a grammar and an organic life. We shall never
have a satisfactory starting-point for our classification unless we put
both word and root out of sight, and confine ourselves to the sentence
or proposition, and the ways in which the sentence may be expressed. The
reason why languages differ morphologically is that the thought which
they embody assumes different forms.
In the second chapter (pp. 122-132) the languages of the world have
been classed as (1) polysynthetic, (2) isolating, (3) incorporating,
(4) agglutinative, (5) inflectional, and (6) analytic, and reason shown
from the structure of the sentence why such a classification should be
made. Steinthal was the first to make the sentence rather than the word
the basis of morphological arrangement, and to point out that where we
are dealing with grammar and structure, we must have at least two words
standing in grammatical relation to each other. Steinthal’s system is
very elaborate. He begins with the division of language into formless
and formal, a division, however, of very questionable accuracy. It seems
to take us back to the scheme of Schlegel, and to forget that where
languages are distinguished from one another by the forms they assume, we
cannot describe any of them as having no form at all. The form of speech,
indeed, is the mode in which the mind views the connection between the
several parts of a proposition, so that wherever we have a proposition,
wherever, in fact, we have language, there must be form. Steinthal,
however, goes on to divide his formless languages into “juxta-positive”
and “compositive,” the Taic languages belonging to the first, and the
Polynesian, Ural-Altaic, and American belonging to the second. The formal
languages are similarly divided into “juxta-positive” and “compositive,”
Chinese coming under the head of the one and Old Egyptian, Semitic, and
Aryan coming under that of the other.
Humboldt did better than Steinthal in using the terms “imperfect” and
“perfect,” instead of “formless” and “formal.” Like Steinthal, he classed
Chinese along with the inflectional languages of Europe, rather than with
Burman and the other isolating idioms of the far East. This seems most
unnatural, since—so far as outward form is concerned—little difference
can be made between isolating Chinese and isolating Burman. It is true
that the order in which the parts of the sentence follow one another is
more or less free in Chinese, while it is fixed in Burman, but this is
a difference essentially unlike that between inflectional Aryan with
its suffixes and inflectional Semitic with its internal vowel-change.
Besides, both Aryan and Semitic are included in the same class. But both
Humboldt and Steinthal found themselves in a difficulty. Starting with
the assumption that all language follows a regular course of development,
ascending from the isolating stage to the inflectional, they had further
to assume that this development was but a reflection of the general
development of the mind, and that the passage from one stage of speech to
the other was marked by a passage to a higher intelligence and a higher
form of civilization. How, then, could it be possible that the Chinese
nation, which seems to have originated a considerable civilization,
should show no signs of that civilization in its language, the mirror and
reflection of the spirit of man? How could it be that the language spoken
by the primitive Aryans, when they were still simple shepherds on the
Hindu-Kush, before they had learnt the elements of writing and culture
from their Semitic neighbours, was so much in advance of that of a race
to whom belonged the hard task of initiating a civilization? The only
escape from the difficulty was to deny that Chinese should be classed
with Burman, in spite of appearances, and so to throw the whole system of
classification into confusion.
For that system depends upon the mode in which the grammatical relations
of the sentence are expressed, and so long as the mode is the same, the
order followed by the several parts of the sentence matters but little.
The order of words, in fact, is constantly liable to change, and the
simple fact that the definite article is postfixed in Scandinavian,
Albanian, Bulgarian, and Wallachian, while it is prefixed in those other
members of the Aryan family which possess one, shows how impossible
it is to ground any important conclusions upon it. The same language
varies from age to age in the position it assigns to the words it uses.
The modern _moreover_, for example, appears as _overmore_ in the Paston
letters, and the Coptic, once a postfix language, has now become a prefix
one. As we shall see presently, the order assumed by the parts of the
sentence depends in great measure upon the development of grammatical
forms.
Humboldt and Steinthal, nevertheless, are quite right in believing that
there is a distinction between Chinese and Burman, but the distinction
is that between a decrepit and civilized language on the one hand and
a fresh and uncultivated language on the other. Chinese civilization
is immensely old, and the language which enshrines it is immensely old
also; but we must be on our guard against supposing that the antiquity of
Chinese is proved by its isolating character. Chinese is no example of
arrested growth, no fossilized relic of an earlier condition of speech.
Were it so, Chinese civilization, and the originality and progress
it implies, would be inexplicable. When we compare classical Chinese
with Burman or Siamese, or even with the less cultivated dialects of
the Chinese empire itself, we find the progress and development we
should expect; but it is progress and development within the limits
of “isolation.” All the possibilities of the isolating sentence have
been worked out; and if these possibilities are not so numerous or so
adequate as in the case of an agglutinative or inflectional sentence, the
fault is due to the original conception of the sentence with which the
Chinese started, not to fossilization or arrested growth. The Mandarin
dialect of China has been affected by phonetic decay to an enormous
extent; numerous sounds have perished, and words once dissimilar have
become identical in pronunciation. By the help of the ancient rhymes,
of the cognate dialects, and of a scientific examination of the written
characters, Dr. Edkins has been able to restore the pronunciation of
Chinese as it was two thousand and more years ago, and the evidences thus
obtained of the wear and tear of the speech are most striking. _Dak_,
“the flute,” for instance, has become _yo_; _zhet_, “the tongue,” is
now _she_ and the table of correspondent sounds given in the foot-note
will show how great has been the changes undergone by the outward form
of the cultivated language.[236] Side by side with this decay of sounds
went a corresponding grammatical development. Tones were introduced
to distinguish words that had come to be pronounced alike, and the
different parts of the sentence were marked out by “empty words,” used
like our “of” or “if” in a purely symbolical and grammatical sense. It
is probable that the spread of education and the extensive employment of
ideographic writing had much to do with the phonetic decay that attacked
the language. Ambiguities in conversation could always be remedied by an
appeal to written symbols. At all events, it is curious that Accadian
was almost equally affected by phonetic decay; and Accadian not only
possessed a similarly ideographic system of writing, but was spoken in a
country where education was similarly widespread, and clay—the ordinary
writing material—was always at hand.
We are apt to assume that inflectional languages are more highly
advanced than agglutinative ones, and agglutinative languages than
isolating ones, and hence that isolation is the lowest stage of the
three, at the top of which stands flection. But what we really mean when
we say that one language is more advanced than another, is that it is
better adapted to express thought, and that the thought to be expressed
is itself better. Now, it is a grave question whether from this point
of view the three classes of language can really be set the one against
the other. So long as thought is expressed clearly and intelligibly, it
does not much matter how it is expressed—how, that is, the relations
of the sentence or proposition are denoted. When we begin to contrast
the morphology of two classes of speech, there is a tendency to import
our prejudices into the question, and to assume that the grammatical
forms to which we have been accustomed are necessarily superior to
those which appear strange to us. The masterpieces of Greek, or Latin,
or Sanskrit literature have produced the impression that the languages
which embody them must surpass all others as instruments of thought.
But such an impression may, after all, be an incorrect one. English
literature stands on quite as high a level as the literature of the
classical tongues. The English language is quite as good an instrument
of thought as Sanskrit or Greek, and yet English can hardly be said
to be inflectional in the way that Sanskrit and Greek are. If we turn
to China we shall find the Chinaman preferring his own classics to
anything produced by the West, and regarding his own language as the
best possible instrument of thought. Preferences of this kind can as
little be referred to an absolute standard as preferences in the matter
of personal beauty. The European, for instance, has a wholly different
ideal of beauty from the Negro, and the Negro from the Mongol. If the
excellence of a language is to be decided by the number and variety of
its grammatical forms, the palm will be borne off rather by the Eskimaux
or the Cheroki than by the dialects of Greece and Rome; if by the
attainment of terseness and vividness, Chinese will come to the front;
if by clearness and perspicacity, English will dispute the prize with
the agglutinative languages. Indeed, the agglutinative languages are
in advance of the inflectional in one important point, that, namely,
of analyzing the sentence into its component parts, and distinguishing
the relations of grammar one from another. It has been remarked[237]
that “were the development theory true, the inflectional would have
developed into the agglutinative, and not the converse.” Thought is
obscured, not assisted, by the existence of different terminations to
express the same grammatical relation, or of the same termination to
express different grammatical relations; and yet this is an anomaly
and source of confusion which continually meets us in the inflectional
tongues. The ascription of gender to inanimate objects is worthy only
of a savage and unreasoning age, and where the signs of gender have
lost all reference to their original import, as in modern German, they
become merely a relic and survival of barbarism. In fact, when we examine
closely the principle upon which flection rests, we shall find that it
implies an inferior logical faculty to that implied by agglutination.
In a flectional language the relations of the sentence are denoted by
particular suffixes or internal vowel-changes, which group themselves, as
it were, round the principal thought contained in the sentence. In other
words, every subordinate thought should be denoted by a flection. Such
a principle, however, cannot be worked. _Amabit_, it is true, means “he
will love;” but in order to express “he must love,” language has to break
through its flectional principle and denote the idea, not by flection,
but by independent words—_necesse est ut amet_, or _illi amandum est_.
But this is not the only mode in which the principle of flection is
violated by the necessities of developed speech. When sentences come to
be brought into relation with one another, the subordinate sentence ought
to be pointed out by flectional means. This is done in some cases, as in
the Greek use of the inflected article with the infinitive. Generally,
however, the subordination is left to be marked by independent words,
such as the conjunctions, by the very means, in fact, adopted by Chinese
and other isolating languages in accordance with their fundamental
principle. In fact, the principle of flection cannot be logically carried
out beyond the narrow circle of those simple sentences which sufficed
for the needs and intelligence of primitive man, and the progress of
thought in modern Europe has been marked by a corresponding revolt
from the trammels of flection. It is only dialects like those of Slavs
and Lithuanians which still cling to an elaborate system of flection.
English has fitted itself to become a universal language by struggling
to assimilate its condition to that of Chinese. Even the polysynthetic
languages of America can, with a certain show of reason, claim a higher
place for themselves than inflectional speech. If the object of language
is to express thought, it is obvious that that thought should be
expressed as a whole, as in a picture; and this is just what is done by
a polysynthetic sentence. Our own language, when it forms such compound
epithets as “The Employers’ Liability for Injury Bill,” or German when it
interpolates a whole sentence between the article and its substantive,
virtually adopt the principle of polysynthetism. Polysynthetism, however,
is only to be preferred when we wish to represent our thought as a single
whole, to bring it before the mind of another just as it presents itself
to our own mind. The best test we really have of a growth in intelligence
and reasoning power is an increasing clearness and analysis of thought.
The polysynthetic languages are essentially the languages of races
whose logical faculties are backward, or who have not yet left behind
them the “jelly-fish” stage of development.[238] Division of labour,
differentiated organization, analysis of thought and its expression—all
these are the signs of advancing civilization.
The whole picture is imaged in the mind before we break it up into
its several parts. So, too, the sentence which embodied a thought was
conceived as a whole before it was separated into its elements. Gestures
were the first makeshift for grammar; they determined the relations of
each particular utterance. Then these utterances came to be compared
together, and those that agreed were put on one side, and those that
disagreed on another. By slow degrees the relations of grammar were thus
evolved; gestures became more and more unnecessary, until at last in
the most highly cultivated languages, such as modern English, they have
disappeared almost entirely or been banished from educated speech. But
this primitive monad, this undifferentiated sentence-word, developed very
variously in the mouths of different speakers. In one case a number of
antecedent circumstances combined to produce a certain conception of the
outer world and the relation of things to each other and to the mind,
altogether unlike the conception which grew up in other cases. Here the
Chinaman regarded the elements of the sentence as co-ordinate and equal,
setting part against part, and member against member, and leaving the
relations between them to be supplied by the mind. There the Mongol drew
a hard and fast distinction between the principal and the subordinate,
between the nucleus of the proposition and the ideas dependent on it,
but he took care to express each by a corresponding word and to place
these words in the exact relation demanded by the thought. Elsewhere,
again, the Hindu merged the subordinate in the principal, expressing
the relations of the several parts of the sentence by modifications
of the individual words or imitating the original form of speech by a
long and elaborate compound. But in all cases the developed sentence of
the later period would seem to have been evolved out of the primitive
undifferentiated one according to the genius of the speakers and the mode
in which they conceived the relations of ideas. The American tongues
alone preserved a semblance of the form once assumed by all speech, and
in the compounds of the inflected idioms we may also trace a reflection
of the earliest utterances of man. What these were may still be gathered
from the grammar of the Eskimaux, even though there is as great a gap
between this and the primæval sentence-words of his forefathers as there
is between the social condition of the Eskimaux and the social condition
of his first ancestors. A cultured language like the Mexican shows the
highest development attainable by the polysynthetic form of speech; here
words may be isolated and separated from the sentence by means of the
affix _tl_. _Sotsitl_, for instance, is “flowers,” _ni-sotsi-temoa_,
“I look for flowers.” All over the world, indeed, wherever we come
across a savage race, or an individual who has been unaffected by the
civilization surrounding him, we find the primitive inability to separate
the particular from the universal by isolating the individual word, and
extracting it, as it were, from the ideas habitually associated with
it. Thus the Hottentot cannot use a noun without a pronominal suffix
indicating not only gender and case but also person as well, except as a
predicate;[239] in several of the South American dialects the words which
denote “head,” “body,” “eye,” or other parts of the person, cannot be
named without personal relation being denoted by a prefixed possessive
pronoun or denied by a negative or privative prefix,[240] and in Mr.
Wallace’s vocabularies from the river Uapes this inability extends to
other words. A Kurd of the Zaza tribe who furnished Dr. Sandwith with a
list of words belonging to his dialect, was so little “able to conceive
a _hand_ or _father_, except so far as they were related to himself, or
something else, and so essentially concrete rather than abstract were
his notions, that he combined the pronoun with the substantive whenever
he had a part of the human body or a degree of consanguinity to name,”
saying _sèrè-min_, “my head,” and _pie-min_, “my father.” Dr. Latham,
from whom this fact is quoted, goes on to refer to a similar amalgamation
noticed by him in the languages of the Louisiade and mentioned in the
appendix to Macgillivray’s “Voyage of the Rattlesnake,” as well as in the
ordinary Gipsy dialect spoken in England.[241]
A morphological review of the languages of the world reveals one
curious and significant fact. Particular types of language belong to
particular localities. In other words, a morphological classification
of speech is also a geographical one. The polysynthetic idioms are
characteristic of America, the isolating dialects of the extreme east of
Asia. So, too, the leading inflectional families of speech, the Aryan
and the Semitic, have both proceeded, it would seem, from Western Asia,
like the Alarodian family, also inflectional, and best represented by
the modern Georgian. The prefix-pronominal languages are confined to
Southern Africa, as the incorporating Basque to the Pyrenees and the
verbless Malayo-Polynesian to the islands of the Pacific. This fact would
go to show that the distant emigration of languages, like the distant
emigration of races, is very exceptional and chiefly characteristic of
the higher species with their greater energy and expansiveness. The
wanderings of savage tribes are circumscribed by the climatic and other
conditions to which they are peculiarly subject. Without canoes voyages
cannot be taken, and mountains, rivers, deserts, or stronger neighbours
are all obstacles to movement more or less insurmountable. The fact would
also go to show that it is only within the area peculiar to a certain
class of languages that we may look for their progress and development.
It is only in Eastern Asia or in America that we can hope to discover the
highest development of which an isolating or a polysynthetic language is
capable, and so regard Chinese and Mexican not as “arrested growths,”
but as instinct with the progressive intelligence and cultivated life
of the peoples that speak them. Where no traces of a type of speech
different from the prevailing one are to be found, we are justified in
concluding that it never existed there. And finally the fact will correct
that tendency we all have to assume a unity upon insufficient evidence.
Types of language, like types of race, are as strongly marked off from
one another as the countries to which they belong. Polysynthetism is as
much characteristic of America as the hatchet face and red skin of the
aboriginal; isolation of Eastern Asia as the yellow skin and oblique
eyes of the Chinaman or the Burman. Modern discoveries are gradually
producing a conviction that the civilizations of China, of Babylonia, and
of Egypt were all independent and self-evolved. Such at all events is the
case with their modes of writing, the best product of any civilization,
and no one can study the character of these three civilizations without
perceiving that they are radically distinct. Egypt, when the monuments
first cast light upon her some 6,000 years ago, is in the height of her
culture and advancement; but she comes before us as a pharos of light
in the midst of utter darkness, self-contained and self-sufficient, but
surrounded on all sides by tribes and nations even more barbarous than
the untaught Negro of to-day. And such as was the civilization, such
too was the language; the civilizations of the Nile, of the Euphrates,
and of the Hoang-ho, were not more isolated and peculiar than the
languages which embodied them. It is difficult for us with our steamers
and railways and telegraphs to realize the separation and practical
immobility of the ancient world. Geographical barriers cut off tribe
from tribe, race from race, language from language, and war instead of
peace was the sole means that existed of overcoming them. It is to these
barriers, however, that we owe the persistency of racial and linguistic
type which we may still note in so many parts of the world. It has often
been remarked that the fauna and flora of America take us back to a
geological rather than a historical age; the same may also emphatically
be said of the American type of speech. The Eskimaux may or may not be
the survivor of the man of the reindeer age; his grammar, at all events,
is a relic of a bygone era of speech.
The morphology of speech, then, deals with the relation of the parts
of the sentence one to another. This relation is expressed by what
we term grammatical forms. Position, it is true, as well as accent,
frequently takes the place of grammatical forms, especially in languages
like Burman or English, but in this case both position and accent will
have to be considered as belonging to the province of morphology. The
rule which in Burman makes the first of two substantives a genitive or
in English a substantive which follows a transitive verb an accusative
is itself a grammatical form. Even in those tongues in which the
expression of grammatical relations is fullest and most exact, there
is much that can never be expressed by outward means, but only hinted
at and understood. “The rudest of men,” says Chaignet,[242] “are yet
sages; ils s’entendent à demi-mot; ils parlent par _sous-entendus_.” “It
is,” as he goes on to observe, “the gesture, the tone, the connection
of the sense or its abrupt breaking off, the undefinable and speaking
expression of the face, that supply and complete our thought, marking its
relations, or more truly its formal side, its most spiritual element,
whereby language raises itself above mere sensation and matter.” The
structure of a language is determined not only by the general type,
isolating, agglutinative, or otherwise, to which it conforms, but also
by the mode in which its words are linked together, by the way in which
its grammatical forms are used and connected, and by the greater or
less extent to which the quickness of the hearer in understanding what
is not expressed is called upon. Structurally, Coptic belongs to the
inflectional class of tongues, but among these it is distinguished by its
prefixing its grammatical forms instead of affixing them, as was the case
with its parent the Old Egyptian.
We must not forget, however, that whether in Coptic or Old
Egyptian, or any other language, the grammatical form, the relation to
be expressed, the idea to be developed and formulated, lay quite as much
in the mere act of prefixing or affixing as in the sounds which were
prefixed or affixed. The Sanskrit _ad-mi_ means “I eat,” not only because
it is a compound of a verbal stem or root signifying “eating,” and the
personal pronoun _mi_, but because the pronoun is attached to the stem
in such a way as to convey the conception of the relation intended to
exist between the two ideas “eating” and “I.” We may therefore lay down
that one of the modes adopted by language for denoting the relations of
grammar is (1) the attachment of prefixes or affixes which may or may not
be significant when used alone. (2) A second is the insertion of what
are called infixes, as in Dayak, where from _kan_, “to eat,” the stem
_k-um-an_ comes, or in Malay, where by the side of _ka-kan_ and _ma-kan_
we have also _k-um-akan_. So, too, in Tagala we find _b-in-atin_ for
_in-batin_, just as in the secondary conjugations of the Semitic verb,
_iphteal_, _iphtael_, _istaphal_, the suffix _ta_ is inserted between
the first and second consonants of the root instead of being prefixed as
elsewhere. No doubt, metathesis aided by analogy was the primary cause
of this curious phænomenon, as it is in the Sanskrit _yu-na-j-mi_, “I
join,” instead of _yuj-na-mi_ corresponding with the Greek ζεύγ-νυ-μι.
The incorporating and polysynthetic languages are examples of the
principle on a large scale. (3) A third mode of expressing the relations
of grammar is by a change of vowel. The vowel may either pass into
another or receive a different quantity or accent. Professor Pott refers
to the use of _vṛiddhi_ in Sanskrit patronymics by way of illustration
as well as to change of accent in Greek proper names or vocatives. A
difference of vowel which was originally purely phonetic has been adapted
to distinguish between singular and plural in the English _man_ and
_men_, between transitive and intransitive in Greek verbs in -όω and -έω.
Among the less cultivated languages of the world extended use has been
made of this method of indicating the forms of grammar. In Javanese,
for instance, _iki_ is “this,” _ika_, “that,” _iku_, “that there;”
in Japanese _ko_ is “here,” _ka_, “there;” in Carib, _ne_ is “thou,”
_ni_, “he;” in Brazilian Botocudo _ati_ is “I,” _oti_, “thou.”[243]
In African Tumali _ngi_ is “I,” _ngo_, “thou,” and _ngu_, “her.” Even
differences of signification may be denoted by the same means; the
Carib _baba_, “father,” is contrasted with _bibi_, “mother,” just as
the Mantschu _chacha_, “man,” and _ama_, “father,” stand over against
_cheche_, “woman,” and _eme_, “mother,” or the Finnic _ukko_, “old man,”
and African Ibo, _nna_, “father,” over against _akka_, “old woman,” and
_nne_, “mother.” The numerals have not escaped being distinguished in
a similar manner; _tizi_ is “one” in Lushu, and _tazi_, “two;” “three”
and “four” are _ngroka_ and _ngraka_ in Koriak, _niyokh_ and _niyakh_
in Kolyma, _gnasog_ and _gnasag_ in Karaga, and _tsúk_ and _tsaak_
in Kamschatkan, while in Japanese _fitó_, _mi(tsu)_, and _yo_, are
“one,” “three,” and “four,” _fŭtá_, _mu(tsu)_, and _yá_, “two,” “six,” and
“eight.”[244] The Grebo of West Africa can distinguish between “I” and
“thou,” “we” and “you,” solely by the intonation of the voice, _mâ di_
being equally “I eat” and “thou eatest,” _a di_, “you” and “we eat,” and
in Bâ-ntu Mpongwe _tŏnda_ means “to love,” _tōnda_, “not to love.”[245]
(4) An internal change of consonant will be the next mode adopted by
language of marking a grammatical idea. Thus in Burman the active is
distinguished from the passive or neuter by aspirating an unaspirated
consonant, _kya_, for instance, being “to fall,” but _khya_, “to throw,”
_pri_, “to be full,” _phri_, “to fill.”[246] (5) Fifthly, position may
be the determining mark of relations of grammar, as is so pre-eminently
the case in Chinese and the Taic languages. It makes a good deal of
difference in English whether we say, “The man killed the dog,” or “The
dog killed the man.” (6) Another determining mark is reduplication,
which is common to all the languages of the world though used to express
very different grammatical ideas. Sometimes it may denote a past tense,
as in Aryan (δέδωκα, _cecidi_, _did_, &c.); sometimes a plural, as in
the Bushman _tu-tu_, “mouths,” the Sonorian _qui-qui_, “houses,” or the
Malay _raja-raja_, “princes;” sometimes a collective, as in the Canarese
_nîru gîru_, “water and the like;” sometimes a superlative, as in the
Accadian _gal-gal_, “very great,” the Mandingo _ding-ding_, “a very
little child,” or the French _beaucoup-beaucoup_, “very much;” sometimes
continuous action, as in the Dayak _kaká-kaka_, “to go on laughing loud,”
or the Tamil _muru-muru_, “to murmur;” sometimes intensity, as in the
Sanskrit _upary-upari_, “higher and higher,” the Greek παμ-φαίνω, “to
shine brightly,” or the Dayak _ku lyang ku lyang_, “to think deeply;”
sometimes emphasis and asseveration, as in the Dayak _kwai kwai_, “very
strange!” _shi shi_, “yes, yes;” sometimes frequentative or repeated
action, as in the Brazilian _acêm_, “I go out,” _ace-acêm_, “I go out
frequently,” _oce-cem_, “they go out one after the other.”[247] The
reduplication is often a broken one, that is, only the first syllable
or part of a syllable is reduplicated, as in the Latin _mo-mordi_ for
_mor-mordi_. Broken reduplication is very common in the Aryan languages,
but Brugman[248] has shown reason for believing that it has arisen out of
an earlier complete reduplication through the action of phonetic decay.
Now and then the reduplication takes place in the middle of a word, as
in the Sonorian Tepeguana where some plurals are formed by repeating the
second syllable, as in _aliguguli_, “boys,” from _alguli_, “boy,” or a
medial syllable, as in _hiim_, “gourds,” and _googosi_, “dogs,” from
the singulars _him_ and _gogosi_.[249] Instead of the first syllable,
only the initial vowel of a word may undergo reduplication; thus in
Tepeguana _ali_, “child,” is _a-ali_ in the plural, _ogga_, “father,”
is _o-ogga_, _ubi_, “woman,” is _u-ubi_. On the other hand, a word may
be lengthened by the repetition of the vowel at the end, as well as
in the middle; the Botocudos of Brazil, for instance, turn _uatu_, “a
stream,” into _uatu-u-u-u_, “ocean;” with the Aponegricans “six” is
_itawuna_, “seven,” _itawu-ú-una_, while the Madagascar _ratchi_, “bad,”
becomes _ra-a-atchi_, “very bad.”[250] When whole words are reduplicated
a change may be made in the initial consonant of the second part of
the reduplication; thus in Canarese the initial consonant becomes the
guttural _g_, as in the example quoted above, and the French _pêle-mêle_
and English _hurdy-gurdy_ are familiar instances of the same fact. Sir
John Lubbock[251] has made an interesting calculation of the proportion
of reduplicated words found in English, French, German, and Greek on the
one side, and some of the barbarous languages of Africa, America, and
the Pacific on the other, the result being that whereas “in the four
European languages we get about two reduplications in about 1,000 words,
in the savage ones the number varies from 38 to 170, being from twenty to
eighty times as many in proportion.” Reduplication, in fact, is one of
the oldest contrivances of speech. It is largely employed by children in
their first attempts to speak, and we need not, therefore, be surprised
at finding it so persistently holding its ground both in the nursery and
among barbarous tribes. The Polynesians seem to have a special affection
for it, though on the other hand, Mr. Matthews tells us that in North
America while reduplication is a prominent feature of the Dakota verb
it occurs in only one verb in the closely allied Hidacha dialect.[252]
Reduplication, however, is one of the most important modes adopted by
language for denoting the relations of grammar; it is, in fact, one of
the most obvious and natural of its outward means of expressing those
inward forms and grammatical conceptions which the human intelligence has
painfully struggled to realize.[253]
The common division of speech into formal and material is at once
defective and misleading. The articulate sounds of which words are
composed may indeed be called their matter, but they do not become
words, do not constitute a part of speech until they have thought and
significancy breathed into them like the breath of life into man. This
significancy is a relative one, that is to say, the meaning of a word
depends upon its relation to some other. But this relation may be of
two kinds, it may exist either between the ideas denoted by the words
or between the words when coupled together in some particular sentence.
In the first case we have to do with sematology, in the second with
grammar. We can understand what is meant by the word _tree_ only by
comparing and contrasting the idea of _tree_ with other cognate ideas;
but the relation between _tree_ and _sheds_ in such a sentence as “the
tree sheds its leaves,” is of a totally different nature. The idea of
_tree_ remains the same whatever be the outward symbol by which it is
expressed, whether _tree_, or _arbor_, or _baum_, or anything else; the
relation between _tree_ and _sheds_ is one that can be discovered only
by a historical and comparative investigation of English grammar. It is
to this grammatical relation alone that the term _formal_ is strictly
applicable; it has to do with the forms, or, as in the instance before
us, the want of forms, whereby the relations of grammar, the relations,
that is, of words in a sentence, are denoted. Going back to the primitive
sentence-word, we shall have to distinguish between the material sounds
of which it was composed, the meaning it always possessed whenever and
however used, and the form (or position) that it assumed according to the
occasion on which it was used. The child who says “Up!” always attaches
the same signification to the general idea contained in the word, but
whether it is to be regarded as an imperative, a hortative, an optative,
or any other particular grammatical form is left to the context, the tone
and gesture, or the intelligence of the bearer. Language consists of the
material, the significant, and the formal, and it is only the latter,
that part of language, in fact, the origin of which we have elsewhere
traced to gesture, that properly concerns morphology.
Whatever, therefore, belongs to grammar belongs also to morphology.
Not only general form and structure, but also grammar in the narrower
sense of the word, as well as composition, and what our German neighbours
term “word-building” must be included under it. Composition, indeed, is
but a species of declension and conjugation. _Parricida_ and _patris
(oc)cisor_, φερέοικος and οἶκον φέρει, have exactly the same force and
meaning. The only difference between _good-for-nothing_ as a compound
and “he is good for nothing” in a complete sentence, is that the first
can be used as an attribute. The ordinary genitive of the Semitic
tongues, the so-called “construct state,” is really an instance of
composition, the first noun—that which “governs” the second—being
pronounced in a single breath with the other, and accordingly losing the
case-terminations. This did not happen originally, as may be seen from
the occasional occurrence of these terminations even in Assyrian, which
is more strict in following out the rule than any other of the cognate
idioms. The power of composition is greater in some languages than in
others. The polysynthetic sentences of an American dialect present the
appearance of gigantic compounds, with this difference, however, that
in a true compound the language has put together two words that have
already been used independently, or at all events are capable of being
used independently, whereas in the less advanced American languages
the several members of the sentence have never attained the rank of
independent words which can be set apart and employed by themselves. Even
in some of the compounds of the Aryan family, where the flectionless
“stem” shows itself, it may be questioned whether we have not before us
the relics of that earliest stage of speech when the flections had not
yet been evolved, and when the relations of grammar were expressed by
the close amalgamation of flectionless stems in a single sentence-word.
However that may be, the power of forming compounds possessed by the
Aryan group of languages stands in marked contrast to the repugnance felt
by the Semitic tongues in this respect. Composition is as rare in Semitic
as it is common in Aryan, and this contrast between the two families
of speech is one of the many that demonstrate the radical difference
existing between them. Perhaps the extended use made by the Semitic
languages of denoting the relations of grammar by internal vowel-change
had much to do with their objection to the employment of compounds. They
are less agglutinative in character than the Aryan dialects, truer, in
fact, to the principle of flection, and the same instinct that makes
them represent the ideas of “killing” and “a killing” by _kodhêl_ and
_kidhl_ (_kedhel_), rather than by _trucida-n-s_ and _trucida-ti-o(n)_,
makes them also use two unallied roots like _hâlach_ and _yâtsâ_
where the Aryan would have said _ire_ and _exire_. Even within the
Aryan family itself we find the Greek with compounds like the comic
λεπαδο-τεμαχο-σελαχο-γαλεο-κρανιο-λειψανο-δριμ-υπο-τριμματο-σιλφιο-
παραο-μελιτο-κατα-κεχυμενο-κιχλ-επι-κοσσυφο-φαττο-περι-στερ-αλεκτρυον-
οπτ-εγ-κεφαλο-κιγκλο-πελειο-λαγῳο-σιραιο-βαλη-τραγανο-πτερύγων,[254]
and the Latin comparatively poor in them, while modern English, in spite
of the loss of its flections, lags but little behind German. Russian can
form such specimens of agglutination as _bezbozhnichestvovat_, “to be in
the condition of being a godless person,” from _bez Boga_, “without God,”
and classical Sanskrit almost dispenses with syntax by its superabundant
use of composition. Where syntax is highly developed, as it was in Latin,
the growth of composition is checked and limited.
Composition has been a fruitful source of grammatical flection, and
a still more fruitful source of what is meant by “word-building.” It
is highly probable that the person-endings of the Aryan verb _as-mi_,
_a(s)-si_, _as-ti_, or ἐσ-μι, ἐσ-σι, ἐσ-τι, are but the personal pronouns
closely compounded with the verbal stem. Such, certainly, has been the
case with the so-called _tempus durans_ of Aramaic, where _kâdhêlnâ_,
“I am killing,” is resolvable into _kâdhêl_ + _’anâ_, “killing + I,”
and _kâdhlath_, “thou art killing,” into _kâdhêl_ + _at’_, “killing +
thou.”[255] The Latin imperfect and future in -_bam_ and -_bo_ seem to be
compounds of the verbal stem with the verb _fuo_, “to exist,”[256] like
the perfect in -_ui_ or -_vi_ (_fui_), while the pluperfect _scripseram_
is a combination of _eram_ or _esam_ and the perfect _scripsi_ (itself
formed from the verbal stem _scrib_- and the old perfect _esi_ of the
substantive verb “sum”). So, too, the form _amavissem_ is just as much
a compound of _amavi_ (_ama_ + _fui_) and _essem_ (_es_ + _siem_) as is
_amatus sum_ of the passive participle and the substantive verb. If we
turn to our own language we can trace our perfects in -_ed_ back to the
Gothic amalgamation of the verb with _dide_, the reduplicated perfect of
the verb _do_, while the origin of the French _aimerai_ in the infinitive
_aimer_ (_amare_) and the auxiliary _ai_ (_habeo_) is as plain as that of
the Italian _dármelo_ (“to give it to me”) or _fáteglielo_ (“do it for
him”). The real character of the compound has come to be forgotten in
course of time, and its final part has gradually lost all semblance of
independence and been assimilated to the terminations which simply denote
grammatical relations. The general analogy of the language has been too
strong for it, and the agglutinated word has become a flection.
But there are many suffixes which are not flections—that is to say,
which do not denote the relations of grammar, or rather the relations
that exist between the different parts of the sentence. In _I loved_ for
_I love-did_ the grammatical relation which we name a perfect tense, is
not really expressed by the suffixed word _did_, but by the reduplication
which that word has undergone. It was the reduplication that gave _did_
(_dide_) the force of a perfect, and the attachment of _did_ to another
verb merely handed on to the latter the perfect force which it already
possessed. Strictly speaking the suffix -_ed_ is a flection only because
it is the relic of a reduplication, the flection—that is to say, the
expression of a grammatical relation—lying in the reduplication or
_form_ of the word. So, too, when we find _dêv-mã_, meaning “in God,”
in Gujerati, or _andhê-mẽ_, meaning “in the blind,” in Hindustani, we
must not suppose that the locative sense actually lies in the suffixes
_mã_ and _mẽ_. These suffixes go back to the Sanskrit _madhyê_, “in
the middle,” where the flection is to be sought in the termination _i_
(contained in _ê_ = _a_ + _i_) not in the stem _madhya_, “middle.”
When, then, we say that composition may be a fruitful source of
flection, what we mean is this. Flection is the means adopted by a
certain class of languages for expressing the relations that exist
between the members of a sentence, but a perception of these relations
must first grow up in the mind before external means are found for
embodying them. The idea of past time must be arrived at and realized
before the simple process of reduplication can be adopted to denote
it. Not only in other languages but also in the Aryan family of speech
reduplication serves to represent other relations of grammar than that
of past time. When the Frenchman says _beaucoup beaucoup_—meaning “very
much”—he is employing reduplication to express the superlative relation
just as much as the old Accadian with his _galgal_, “very great,” while
the very fact that there are Greek presents like δίδωμι and τίθημι, ought
to show that there was once a time in the history of Aryan speech when
reduplication served other purposes than that of denoting past time.
So it is with all the rest of the grammatical machinery which we call
flection. First of all the growing intelligence came to have, as it were,
an intuition of certain relations between the parts of a sentence, and
then sounds and forms already existing were adapted to denote these. And
the very same form might at successive periods in the development of a
language be adapted to denote different relations, as we have just seen
was the case with reduplication. When suffixes were used for a similar
purpose, they too had to follow the general analogy. Many of these
suffixes seem coeval with the beginnings of Aryan speech, at least so far
as we know anything about it, but others of them, like the person-endings
of the verb, are really instances of composition, the final part of the
compound having become a mere suffix, and so, like many other suffixes,
been adapted to the use of flection.
This brings us to those suffixes which have never been applied to a
purely flectional purpose. If we turn over the pages of an English
dictionary we shall come across the two familiar words _knowledge_ and
_wedlock_, which at first sight seem to have nothing in common. On
tracing them back to earlier forms, however, we find that _knowledge_,
Old English _know-leche_, like _wed-lock_, Old English _wed-lâc_, are
both compounded with the Anglo-Saxon _lâc_, “sport” or “gift,” the Old
High German _leih_, the Old Norse _leikr_, and the Gothic _láiks_. The
word still survives in the north of England under the form of _laik_, “to
play,” and the provincial _lake-fellow_ is merely “play-fellow.”[257]
Several abstracts were formed in Anglo-Saxon by the help of it; thus we
have _feoht-lâc_, “fight,” _gudh-lâc_, “battle,” _bryd-lâc_, “marriage,”
_reaf-lâc_, “robbery.”
Now what has happened in the case of the English _lâc_ has happened in
the case of a good number of other words in all the languages spoken
throughout the world. Words originally independent and distinct become
so glued together in composition that one of them loses its personal
identity, as it were, and comes to be the mere shadow of the other, whose
meaning it qualifies and classifies. Thus, for instance, the Greek κατὰ,
when compounded with the verb ἄγω, “to lead,” limits the sense of the
latter to “leading down,” and our own _hood_ or _head_, the Anglo-Saxon
_hâd_, “a state,” in words like _Godhead_ or _maidenhood_, refers the
nouns to which it is attached to a new and particular class.
Besides flectional suffixes, then, classificatory or formative suffixes
also may ultimately be due to the process of composition. Upon them,
too, analogy will have worked its influence, assimilating them to the
other suffixes which in course of time they had come to resemble. When
composition had once reduced a word to the condition of a mere adjunct of
another word, there was no reason why it should not be put to the same
uses as other similar adjuncts. When the root _bhar_, “to bear,” in such
Latin compounds as _leti-fer_ could no longer be distinguished from the
suffix -_tio(n)_ in words like _na-tio_, it was naturally treated in the
same way.
But it does not follow, as a good number of writers on language have
assumed, that because some of the classificatory suffixes are examples of
composition, all of them are so, any more than in the case of flection
and the flectional suffixes. Indeed, we have only to glance at the
numerous suffixes employed by our own Aryan family of speech in forming
or “building” words to see how impossible it would be to trace back a
large proportion of them to independent words. How, for instance, could
we claim any such origin for the suffixes -_la_- and -_ra_- in _querela_
and λαμπρὸς, or the suffixes -_ana_-, -_na_, and -_an_ in _pecten_,
_donum_, and ἱκανός? With such suffixes all we can do is to watch the
changes they have undergone, or caused other sounds to undergo, through
the action of phonetic decay and false analogy. Thus in Latin where
the combination _sr_ changes into the softer _br_, stems like _ceres_
(Sanskrit _śiras_), “head,” and _fes_ (as in _festus_) have turned into
_cerebrum_ and _Februus_ when combined with the suffix -_ra_; and if we
take the suffix _as_ itself, we shall find its sibilant passing into
_r_ before another vowel, and so originating a long series of curious
transformations. The _r_ which we get in the genitive of _temporis_ was
transferred by analogy to the nominative also, where no vowel followed
it, and though there was a struggle at first between the twin forms in
_s_ and _r_, traces of which survive in the twin _arbos_ and _arbor_,
the later and incorrect form with _r_ finally carried the day, and
classical Latin knows only of a _sopor_, not a _sopos_. But it may be
asked why should the penultimate syllable of _sopōris_ be long whereas
it is short in _tempŏris_ and _arbŏris_, and why, too, should _sopor_ be
masculine while _tempus_ is neuter? Here, again, false analogy has been
at work. A certain number of masculine nouns terminating in -_tor_ and
denoting agents, like _dator_ or _victor_, existed in the language, and
when _sopos_ was changed to _sopor_, it was assimilated to these both
in gender and in declension. Even _victor_, however, had passed under
the action of false analogy. When we compare the Latin _victor_ with
_pater_, or the Greek σωτήρ with πατήρ, it is at once clear that we are
dealing in each case with the same suffix, although in _victor_ the vowel
has been thickened into the fuller _o_. But while _victor_ and σωτήρ
have a long vowel in the oblique cases, this is not the case with the
much older words _pater_ and πατήρ (accusative πατέρα). It is evident,
therefore, that this long vowel must have been a sort of after-thought;
and so, in fact, it was. First of all the vowel of the nominative was
lengthened to compensate for the loss of the final sibilant (_paters_),
and the quantity of the vowel in the nominative was then analogically
extended to the other cases as well. How far this was from having been
originally the case may be gathered from another form of the same suffix
which we have in the Sanskrit _patram_, the Greek πτέρον, and the Latin
_ara-tr-um_. Here the vowel between the two consonants of the suffix has
disappeared altogether, as it has also in words like the Latin _sæclum_
for _sæ-culu-m_, or the Gothic _nê-thla_, our _needle_, where the suffix,
in spite of the change it has suffered, really goes back to _tar_. The
latter group of words (in _tar_), however, is distinguished from the
former (in _trum_) in both signification and gender, the masculine agent
being replaced by a neuter noun of instrumentality. We can easily see how
such a transition of meaning must have come about. The agent presupposes
the act just as much as the act presupposes the agent. Agent and act, in
fact, are co-relative terms, and the parent-Aryan distinguished them,
not by the classificatory suffix—for they both belonged to the same
class—but by the flectional suffix, which was in the one case -_s_ in
the nominative singular, and in the other -_m_. The Latin _trucidator_
and the English _murder_ (formerly _murther_, like _slaugh-ter_
and _laugh-ter_) have precisely the same suffix, and it is only a
recollection of the difference in meaning in the flectional suffixes
which has survived their loss that prevents them from being used with
the same signification. Even these flectional suffixes themselves—as we
shall see hereafter—did not originally imply that difference of meaning
to the expression of which they were afterwards adapted. In nouns like
the Latin _virus_ or the Sanskrit _śiras_-, the final sibilant denoted
a neuter rather than a masculine or a feminine, while _servum_ or _humum_
show that the final labial might characterize the objective case of both
masculine and feminine nouns.
The suffix _tar_ (_ter_) brings us back to those classificatory
suffixes which trace their descent from independent words, if, as is very
probable, we have to connect it with the root found in our _through_, the
Latin _trans_ and _ter-minus_, the Zend _tarô_, “across,” the Sanskrit
_tar-âmi_, “I pass over,” and perhaps, too, the numeral _tri_, _tres_,
_three_.[258] It is not difficult to understand how a word signifying
“to go through with a thing,” could be taken to form nouns of agency.
What more suitable description could be given of “a giver” than “one who
goes through with giving,” _dator(s)_? The antiquity of this use of the
suffix in our family of speech may be gathered from the fact that it
is employed to form those nouns of relationship which are the first to
require a name. _Brother_, _sister_, _daughter_, _mother_, _father_, all
contain this ancient suffix. _Brother_ (_bhrâ-tar_) is “the bearer,” from
the root _bhar_, _daughter_, “the milker” or rather “sucker,” from the
root _dugh_, while the Sanskrit grammarians derive _father_ (_pitar_) and
_mother_ (_mâtar_) from the roots _pâ_ and _mâ_, which respectively mean
“to defend” and “to create.” It is obvious, however, that both “father”
and “mother” must have received names long before it was necessary
to speak of “going across” or “passing through,” and that our Aryan
ancestors would not have waited to compound two words together before
giving names to the nearest and dearest of relationships. As a matter
of fact, in almost all languages names have been found for the parent
in the two simple labial utterances _pa_ and _ma_; and the identity of
these with the Aryan roots _pâ_ and _mâ_ must be a pure accident. What
seems to have happened in the case of our names of relationship was this.
When the Aryan family first comes before us in the records of speech,
it is as a civilized clan with a vast but indeterminate background of
unknown history lying behind them. They had long since entered upon
what may be termed the epithetic stage, when man discovered that he was
a poet, and began to invent epithets for the objects about him, and to
form compounds. It was at this stage of culture and civilization that the
Aryan community coined compound epithets for _brother_, for _daughter_,
and for _sister_, which succeeded in driving out and replacing the older
words that had preceded them. The new compounds in _tar_ took the fancy
of the community, and were widely extended by the force of analogy. The
old labials which had done duty for the ideas of “father” and “mother”
followed the fashion set by the younger names of relationship, and so
just as _bhrâ-tar_ had come to signify “brother,” _pa-tar_ and _mâ-tar_
came to signify “father” and “mother.”
Languages do not begin with composition. If the sentence is anterior to
the word, a considerable time must elapse between the first beginnings of
a language and the piecing together of two independent words. Isolating
tongues like the Chinese or the Burman, where so much use is made of
composition in order to create new conceptions or to define old ones,
are shown by this very fact to have passed into a decrepit stage of
existence. The epithetic stage is one far advanced in the history of a
speech; it implies poetic imagination, a certain measure of culture and
civilization, and the germs of a mythology. The new compounds of this
epithetic stage follow the genius and analogy of the language to which
they belong. If the formation of words depends largely on the use of
suffixes, the newly coined words will in time adapt themselves to the
old rule; what were once independent words will become suffixes, and be
employed in exactly the same way as the other suffixes of the language.
The very existence, then, of classificatory suffixes due to composition
in our Indo-European idioms implies the existence of earlier suffixes for
which we cannot claim a similar origin. We have already seen that this is
the case with many of the suffixes which serve the purposes of flection;
though the person-endings of the verb go back to separate words, every
attempt to discover such a derivation for the principal case-endings has
ended in failure. What is true of the case-endings is pre-eminently true
of those suffixes which are neither flectional nor classificatory. If we
analyze the Latin _alumnus_, we find first of all the flectional suffix
-_(u)s_, then the classificatory suffix _mino_, which relegates the word
to the same class of middle participles as the Greek τυπτόμενος, and
lastly, the suffix _u_, which intervenes between the root _al_ and the
classificatory suffix _mino_. We may call this _u_ a “connecting-vowel,”
or “an euphonic vowel,” or anything else we choose, but the fact remains
that it is a suffix which can be separated from the root _al_. It is a
suffix, however, which is neither flectional nor classificatory, and
may be termed secondary for want of a better name. Secondary suffixes
play an important part in our family of speech, and just as a flectional
suffix often appears as a classificatory one, so, too, a classificatory
suffix may appear as a secondary one. If, for example, we compare a word
like _civitas_ (_civ-i-ta-t-s_) with _sec-ta_, we may not only get the
secondary suffix -_i_-, following immediately upon the root, but also
a reduplication of the classificatory suffix _ta_, which here at least
can have no classificatory sense. We may accordingly define a secondary
suffix as one which does not refer the word of which it forms a part to
any particular class; and where we have several classificatory suffixes
amalgamated together the first of these have generally become secondary.
Thus the English _songstress_ is a combination of two suffixes, one
Saxon and the other Romanic, which equally denoted the feminine. By the
side of _sang-ere_, “the singer,” stood in Anglo-Saxon _sang-estre_,
“the songstress;” it was only when the classificatory significance of
the termination had died out that a new one which really went back to
the Greek -ισσα through the Latin _issa_ (as in _abbatissa_), and the
French -_esse_ (as in _justesse_),[259] was attached to it, and so the
old classificatory suffix became a merely secondary one. In fact, as soon
as the force of a classificatory suffix has been weakened in a word, a
fresh classificatory suffix is always ready to be attached to it, just
as children will talk of _more-er_ and _most-est_, or as Lord Brougham
introduced the equally anomalous _worser_.
Now these secondary suffixes play a most important part in a
large number of languages, and more especially in our own Aryan ones.
It is seldom that a classificatory or flectional suffix can be added
immediately to the root, as in the Sanskrit _ad-mi_, “I eat;” a secondary
suffix has usually to intervene, by means of which the root is raised
to what has been variously termed a base, a theme, or a stem. So far as
the Indo-European family of speech is concerned, it is probable that
even such exceptions to the general rule as that of _ad-mi_ are really
due to phonetic decay, which has worn away the original stem to a simple
monosyllable, as it has done in so many English words like _man_ or
_fall_. When we come to deal with roots, we shall see good reason for
believing that they were all or for the most part once dissyllabic, and
the tendency that many children show to turn the monosyllables of modern
English into dissyllabic words may be but an instinctive reversion to
the early type of speech. No doubt it is very possible that just as
classificatory suffixes have been changed into secondary ones, so on the
other hand secondary suffixes may have come in course of time to assume
a classificatory character. A conspicuous example of this may be found
in the suffix _ya_, which in Greek words like φέρουσα for φερο-ντ-yα,
or δότειρα for δοτ-ερ-yα, has become a mark of the feminine gender. A
distinction of gender is by no means engrained in the nature of things,
and the majority of spoken languages, such as most of those which are
agglutinative or isolating, know nothing at all of it. In some idioms,
those of the Eskimo, Chocktaw, Mushtogee, and Caddo, for instance,[260]
the place of gender is taken by the division of objects into animate
and inanimate, while elsewhere they are divided into rational and
irrational. In the Bâ-ntu dialects of South Africa, nouns are separated
into a number of classes, in one case as many as eighteen, by means of
prefixes which were originally substantives like our -_dom_, -_ship_,
or -_hood_; and the agreement of the pronoun, adjective, and verb with
the substantive is denoted by the employment of the same suffix. Bleek
has not inaptly compared these classes of the Bâ-ntu noun with the
genders of our own family of speech. Thus if we were to take a noun like
I-SI-_zwe_, “nation,” which belongs to the _si_-class or gender, in order
to express the sentence “our fine nation appears, and we love it,” the
Kafir would have to say I-SI-_zwe_ S-_etu_ E-SI-χ’_le_ SI-_ya-bonakala_
_si_-SI-_tanda_, literally “nation ours appears, we-it-love.” Similarly
the noun U-LU-_ti_, “stick,” would require a corresponding change of
prefix in the words in agreement with it; and the sentence would run:
U-LU-_ti_ LW-_etu_ O-LU-χ’_le_ LU-_ya-bonakala_ _si_-LU-_tanda_.[261]
There are many indications that the Aryan language, or rather the
ancestor of that hypothetical speech which we term the parent-Aryan, was
once itself without any signs of gender. We have only to turn to Latin
and Greek to see that the words which denote “father” and “mother,”
_pater_ and _mater_, πατὴρ and μητὴρ, have exactly the same termination,
while so-called diphthongal stems as well as stems in _i_ (_ya_) and
_u_ (like ναῦς and νέκυς, πόλις and λῖς) may be indifferently masculine
and feminine. Even stems in _o_ and _a_, though the first are generally
masculine and the second generally feminine, by no means invariably
maintain the rule, and feminines like _humus_ and ὁδός or masculines like
_advena_ and πολίτης show us that there was a time when these stems also
indicated no particular gender, but owed their subsequent adaptation,
the one to mark the masculine and the other to mark the feminine, to
the influence of analogy. How analogy came to act seems to have been as
follows. First of all the idea of gender was suggested by the difference
between man and woman, male and female, and, as in so many languages at
the present day, was represented not by any outward sign, but by the
meaning of the words themselves. Thus in the Hidacha of North America we
are told that “gender is distinguished by using, for the masculine and
feminine, different words, which may either stand alone or be added to
nouns of the common gender,”[262] and in the Sonorian languages further
south it can only be denoted by the addition of words which signify
“man” and “woman.”[263] Then when the conception of gender had once
been arrived at it was extended to other objects besides those to which
it properly belongs. The primitive Aryan had not yet distinguished the
object thought of from the subject that thought of it; he was still
in the stage of childhood, and just as he transferred the actions and
attributes of inanimate objects to himself, so too he transferred to
them the actions and attributes of himself, and endowed them with a life
similar to his own. The same age which saw the creation and growth of a
mythology saw also the origin of gender in nouns, and the distinction of
gender in the demonstrative pronouns, due to their reference to animate
beings, reacted on the nouns expressive of inanimate objects to which
they likewise referred. As soon as the preponderant number of stems in
_o_ in daily use had come to be regarded as masculine on account of their
meaning, other stems in _o_, whatever might be their signification, had
to follow the general rule and be classed as masculine nouns. How readily
the gender of a word may be determined by its termination has been
already seen in the history of the Latin stems in -_os_. Here and there
the constant use of a word with particular pronouns or its obvious and
natural meaning resisted the common tendency, and hence the preservation
of such anomalies as ὁδός, _humus_,[264] and _advena_ mentioned above.
The suffix _ya_, however, like the suffix -ιδ- (as in αὐλητρίς) in
Greek or the suffix -_ic_- (as in _victrix_) in Latin, formed part of
a class of words which all followed the dominant type; neither use nor
meaning interfered with the appropriation of them all to express the
feminine gender. The accident by which the suffix was attached to words
which chiefly denoted female agents eventually caused it to become a
classificatory instead of remaining a mere secondary suffix. But the
Aryans were not contented with only two genders, as the Semites and some
other races were. A time came when the Aryan awoke to the consciousness
that he was essentially different from the objects about him, that the
life with which he had clothed them was really but the reflection of his
own. He began to distinguish the agent from the patient, and to turn his
middle conjugation into a passive one. The first sign of this new-grown
consciousness was the formation of a nominative for the first personal
pronoun; _ego_, ἐγών, the Sanskrit _aham_, is a far later creation than
the objective _me_ or _mâ_, and whether it be a compound or not, as some
scholars believe, at all events it marks the epoch when the “me” became
an “I.” The discovery had been made that a difference existed between
the nominative and the accusative. But this difference existed only in
the case of animate beings, or of those objects which the custom of
language and the habits of thought it had produced regarded as animate;
there was another class of objects and ideas which were beginning to
require a name and yet could not be reckoned as coming under either of
the two genders with which the language was already acquainted. The same
development of thought which had revealed the distinction between subject
and object brought with it also the conception of abstracts or general
terms. Besides the individual trees which had long ago received their
names, the idea of “tree” itself now needed a word to express it, and the
speaker was no longer contented with detailing his single utterances one
by one, but wanted a general term like “word” or “speech” wherein to sum
them up. And so the new class of neuter nouns came into existence, which
were really nothing more than old accusative cases or bare stems used as
nominatives and given a separate life of their own. So far as form goes,
the Greek δένδρον and ἔπος cannot be distinguished from λόγον and ὄπες,
the Sanskrit _vâchas_ representing both ἔπος and ὄπες alike, any more
than the Latin _regnum_ and _vulgus_ can be distinguished from _dominum_
and _reges_. In the pronouns the bare stem in _t_ or _d_, which had once
served for all cases and all genders, was set apart for neuter nouns,
and the Aryan declension was made complete with its encumbrance of three
genders, which it has needed the practical genius of the English language
to shake off. The further changes that took place in the distribution of
these three genders must be described by the historical grammars of the
special languages of the Aryan family: the age came when their original
meaning and intention was as much forgotten as that of mythology; they
were looked upon as the functions of certain suffixes which thus became
classificatory, and, as in Latin stems in -_as_ or French nouns like
_mer_ which owe their gender to the confusion of the plural nominative
_maria_ with the singular nominative of _musa_, they became the sport
and puppet of false analogy. The mixture of dialects which varied as to
the genders they assigned to particular nouns completed the confusion,
and modern German is an instance of a language which still clings to an
outward excrescence of speech which originated in childish habits of
thought and has now lost all sense and reason for its existence. A mere
tax upon the memory and an embarrassment to free literary expression, it
is no wonder that German genders are a sore trial to the children, who
are sometimes several years before they learn to use them correctly. In
this respect they resemble the Swedish peasantry, who are said to find an
equal difficulty with the genders of their own tongue.
The origin of gender is one of the questions belonging to what
some German scholars have termed “the metaphysics of language.” The
metaphysics of language deals with the source and nature of grammatical
ideas as distinct from the phonetic machinery by which they are
expressed; it seeks by a comparison, firstly of cognate dialects and
then of families of speech, to discover the conception which lay at
the bottom of such grammatical facts as gender, number, and the like.
We want to know not merely how the relations between the several parts
of the sentence are expressed, but what those relations actually are.
The idea must exist before phonetic means are adapted to represent it,
and in order to reach it we must scientifically trace the history of
the phonetic means. The metaphysics of speech, therefore, is but the
second branch and division of its morphology, bearing the same relation
to the inquiry into the growth and origin of stems and suffixes and
suchlike phonetic forms of grammar that sematology does to phonology.
The morphology of language is as much concerned with grammatical ideas
as with the external form in which they are embodied. It is these
grammatical ideas more than their phonetic embodiment that constitute the
_structure_ of a tongue.
Let us see, for example, whether we can track the conception of
number back to its first starting-point. Strange as it may seem there
are some uncivilized languages which make as little distinction between
the singular and the plural as we do ourselves when we use words like
_sheep_. Thus Mr. Matthews states that “Hidatsa nouns suffer no change of
form to indicate the difference between singular and plural,”[265] and in
the Sonorian tongues, according to Buschmann,[266] “the simple word in
the singular serves also for the plural,” while the monosyllabic Othomi
can distinguish between singular and plural only by the prefixed article
_na_ and _ya_,[267] and the Amara of Africa can only say _fŭrŭsn ayŭhu_,
“I have seen horse,” leaving the hearer to decide whether the horse is
one or many. In spite of the vast length of time during which these
languages have been shaping and perfecting themselves, the conception of
number is still so far from being consciously realized that no phonetic
means have yet been adapted or devised to express it. If we turn to the
Tumali of Africa we find in the case of the personal pronouns _ngi_, “I,”
_ngo_, “thou,” and _ngu_, “he,” a slight advance upon this poverty of
thought. Here the plural is denoted by the postposition _da_, “with,” so
that _ngi-n-da_, “we,” is literally “(some one) with me.” The mind has
come to distinguish between itself and that which is outside itself, to
realize, in fact, that it has an individual existence distinct from that
of some one else, and so the conception of duality is attained. At this
conception mankind stopped for a long while; indeed, there are many races
and tribes who have not even yet passed beyond it. Wherever the so-called
plural is formed by means of reduplication—that is to say, wherever the
doubling of a thing is the furthest point of multiplicity to which the
mind can reach, there we have not yet a true plural, but only a dual. All
over the world reduplication seems to have been the earliest contrivance
for denoting something beyond the singular, and to this day in Bushman,
as in many other savage jargons, it serves for a plural.[268] The same
evidence that is borne by the so-called reduplicated plural is borne also
by the numerals. The aborigines of Victoria, according to Mr. Stanbridge,
“have no name for numerals above two;”[269] the Puris of South America
call “three” _prica_ or “many,” which is also the original meaning of the
same numeral in Bushman, and “the New Hollanders,” says Mr. Oldfield of
the western tribes, “have no names for numbers beyond _two_.” It is even
possible, as has been already noticed, that our own Aryan _tri_, _three_,
goes back to the same root as that of the Sanskrit _tar-ô-mi_, “I pass
beyond,” and once signified nothing more than that which is “beyond”
two. The fact that the conception of duality preceded the conception of
plurality, explains how it is that the seemingly useless dual has been
preserved in so many languages by the side of the plural. It is a relic
of a bygone epoch, a survival, as Mr. Tylor would call it, which tends
to be more and more restricted in use until it disappears altogether. In
both Aryan and Semitic the dual appears only as an archaic and perishing
form. The Æolic, in this as in the throwing back of the accent, the least
conservative of the Greek dialects, has lost it entirely; the Latin
keeps it merely in _duo_, _octo_, and _ambo_, and if we pass to the
Semitic idioms, the dual of the noun is preserved only in words which
denote natural pairs like “the eyes” or “the ears,” while in the verb
it has been maintained by Arabic alone, and in some exceptional cases
by Assyrian. Language, however, did not always proceed at once from the
dual to the plural, from the conception, that is, of limited plurality to
the conception of unlimited plurality. Many languages possess a trinal
number, or what are called inclusive and exclusive forms of the personal
pronouns, and in one of the Melanesian idioms, as well as in Vitian or
Fijian, we even find a quadruple number formed by the attachment of
_tavatz_ or _tovatz_, “four,” to the pronouns _na_, “you,” and _dra_,
“we.”[270] In Cheroki the dual of the first person has one form when one
of two persons speaks to the other, another form when the one speaks of
the other to a third, _inaluiha_ being “we two (_i.e._ thou and I) are
tying it;” _awstaluiha_, “we two (_i.e._ he and I) are tying it.” In
Annatom, again, _aniyak_ is “I,” _akaijan_, “you two + I,” _ajumrau_,
“you two - I,” _akataij_, “you three + I,” _aijumtaij_, “you three -
I.” More usually the reduplicated dual led to a plural without the
intervention of a trinal number, or the plural was denoted by some word
like “multitude” or “heap,” which in course of time came to be a plural
sign, just as in other instances it came to signify the numeral “three.”
In the Aryan languages M. Bergaigne has shown[271] that the plural of the
weak cases (nominative, accusative, and vocative) was identical with the
singular of abstract nouns, and their formatives, -_as_ or -_âs_, -_i_ or
-_î_, -_â_ or -_yâ_, and -_an_, continued to the last to mark abstracts
like the Sanskrit _áhan_, “the day,” _lipi_, “writing,” _vrajyâ_, “the
act of travelling,” or _mudâ_, “joy.” So in Semitic Assyrian, where
an abstract is generally regarded as feminine, the feminine plural in
-_utu_ has become the termination of singular nouns like _śarrutu_, “a
kingdom,” and then by a curious change of function been appropriated to
a certain class of masculine plurals. There are reasons for thinking
that the Semitic plural has been based on the dual; however this may be,
the suffixes of the Aryan plural, so far at least as the weak cases are
concerned, are suffixes which we find elsewhere used as secondary and not
classificatory ones.
Even the genitive case, necessary as it appears to us to be, once had
no existence, as indeed it still has none in groups of languages like
the Taic or the Malay. Instead of the genitive, we here have two nouns
placed in apposition to one another, two individuals, as it were, set
side by side without any effort being made to determine their exact
relations beyond the mere fact that one precedes the other, and is
therefore thought of first. Which of the two should thus precede depended
on the psychological point of view of the primitive speaker. We are all
acquainted with the distinction between the objective genitive where
the governed word is the object of the other, as in _amor Socratis_,
“love felt for Socrates,” and the subjective genitive where the converse
is the case, as in _Socratis amor_, “love felt by Socrates,” and this
distinction has led to two different conceptions of the genitive relation
being formed by different races. In the Aryan family, for instance, the
genitive must precede its governing noun; _Horsetown_, equally with
_horse’s town_, means “town of the horse.” In Semitic, on the contrary,
the position of the words is reversed; here the genitive has to follow,
not precede. Perhaps we may see in the position of the genitive in the
two great inflectional families of speech a symbol of the characters of
the two races. The Aryan, the inventor of induction and the scientific
method, fixes his first attention on the phænomenon and traces it up to
its source; the Semite, on the other hand, makes the first cause his
starting-point, and derives therefrom with easy assurance all the varying
phænomena that surround him.
Now, this apposition of two nouns, which still serves the purpose of
the genitive in many languages, might be regarded either as attributive
or as predicative. If predicative, then the two contrasted nouns formed
a complete sentence, “cup gold,” for instance, being equivalent to “the
cup is gold.” If attributive, then one of the two nouns took the place
of an adjective, “gold cup” being nothing more than “a golden cup.” The
apposition of two substantives is thus the germ out of which no less
than three grammatical conceptions have developed—those of the genitive,
of the predicate, and of the adjective. It is but another instance of
that principle of differentiation which we have found at work upon the
phonetic forms whereby the relations of grammar are expressed. Dr.
Friedrich Müller has observed[272] that, as a general rule, the attribute
and the genitive, or as he terms it the possessive, occupy the same
place, and are treated as one and the same relation. In Hottentot, as
in Chinese, where the defining noun must precede that which is defined,
“right-path” means equally “the right path” and “the path of right,” and
our own English language is another example of the same usage. In Malay,
on the contrary, as in the Semitic tongues, both adjective and genitive
have to follow the noun they define; thus the Malayan _ōran ūtan_, or
“man of the wood,” is literally “man-wood,” and _gūmin besar_, “a great
mountain,” “mountain-great.” On the other hand, the predicative relation
is marked off from the attributive and genitival by a converse order
of words; in Malay, for instance, the predicate is placed before its
subject, as in _besar gūmin_, “great (is) the mountain,” and the Semitic
perfect is formed by affixing the pronouns of the first and second
persons to a participle or verbal noun.[273] These primitive contrivances
for distinguishing between the predicate, the attribute, and the
genitive, when the three ideas had in the course of ages been evolved by
the mind of the speaker, gradually gave way to the later and more refined
machinery of suffixes, auxiliaries, and the like.
Now it will be noticed that while the predicative relation is contrasted
with the attributive and the genitival, the two latter assume the same
form. Where the relations of grammar are denoted by position alone, no
distinction is made between the attribute and the possessive. There
is nothing in the outward form to tell us whether in expressions like
_horsetown_ or _ōran ūtan_, _horse_ and _ūtan_ are to be considered as
adjectives or as genitives. And in point of fact there is at bottom
little or no difference between them. The primitive instinct of language
did not err in treating the two conceptions as essentially one and
the same. A “gold cup” is exactly equivalent to a “cup of gold.” The
adjective describes the attribute which defines and limits the class
to which its substantive belongs; and so, too, does the genitive. Both
indicate the species of a genus, limiting the signification of the
substantive, and so having the same functions as those determinatives
which, as we have seen, play so large a part in a Chinese or Burman
dictionary. In such languages these defining words perform the same
classificatory office as the classificatory suffixes of an Aryan dialect;
but whereas the classificatory suffixes of an inflectional tongue are
neither adjectives nor attributes, the classificatory substantives of the
isolating language are really both. We are told that a school-inspector
plucked some children a short time ago for saying that _cannon_ in
_cannon-ball_ was a noun instead of an adjective; the pedantry of the act
was only equal to the ignorance it displays, and illustrates how often
the artificial nomenclature of grammar breaks down when confronted with
the real facts of language.
So long therefore as the adjective or genitive is denoted by position
only, we cannot draw any true line of distinction between them and the
determinatives of the Taic idioms. They all have the same end—that of
limiting and defining a noun—of referring it to some special class or
investing it with some special quality. Hence it is that the genitive
case so frequently assumes the form of an adjective, even in those
languages in which the adjective and the genitive have been eventually
distinguished from one another. In the Tibetan dialects adjectives are
formed from substantives by the addition of the sign of the genitive, as
_ser-gyi_, “golden,” from _ser_, “gold;” and in Hindustani the genitive
takes the marks of gender according to the words to which it refers.[274]
Greek adjectives like δημό-σιο-ς remind us of the old genitive δημοσιο,
which has become δημοῖο in Homer, or the Sanskrit genitive _śiva-sya_
and the pronouns _ta-syâ-s_ and _ta-sya-i_, and though the suffix of
δημό-σιο-ς was originally rather -_tya_ than -_sya_, since a Greek
sibilant between two vowels tends to disappear, the two suffixes once
performed the same functions and bore the same relation to each other as
the demonstratives _sa_ and _ta_. The Aryan genitive stands on the same
footing as the other cases of the nouns which have been traced back by
M. Bergaigne to adjectives used adverbially. If we look at the Bâ-ntu
languages we shall have little difficulty in understanding the reason of
this close connexion between adjective and genitive. As we have seen, the
agreement of words together in these languages is pointed out by the use
of common prefixes, which were once independent substantives, and have
come to answer somewhat to the marks of gender in Greek and Latin. The
same prefixes, however, not only indicate the concord of adjective and
substantive, of verb and subject, but also of nominative and genitive.
Thus the Zulu would say I-SI-_tya_ S-O-_m-fazi_, “the dish of the woman,”
where the common prefix _si_ declares the relation that exists between
the two ideas. If we assume that the primary meaning of _si_ was “mass,”
the words I-SI-_tya_ S-O-_m-fazi_ would properly be read “mass-dish
mass-woman.” The word _si_ is thus the standard and connecting link by
means of which the other two are brought together and compared. It had
been attached to a certain group of words at a time when the conception
of adjective or genitive had not yet been clearly realized, and when mere
position, mere apposition, indicated by itself the association of two
ideas. This close association caused it finally to lose all distinctive
existence of its own, to become, in short, an “empty word” or formative,
the index of a particular class like the classificatory suffixes of our
own tongues. Like these suffixes, again, it came to have what would be
called in Sanskrit or Greek a flectional power; it not only marked the
class to which the substantive belonged, but also the fact that another
word was in concord with it. Whether this were a concord of the adjective
or the genitive, however, the Kafir dialects have never advanced so far
as to determine.
Unlike either the Kafir with prefixes which denote at once attribute,
possessive, and even predicate, or the Aryan languages with their
suffixes each fulfilling a special function, the Semitic tongues
distinguished between genitive and adjective by subordinating the
governing word to its “genitive,” and keeping the attention fixed on the
characteristics which separated species from species within a common
genus. While the adjective constituted an independent word by the side
of the substantive with which it was joined, the genitive was regarded
merely as the latter half of a compound of which the word defined by it
was the first part. In the so-called _construct state_, the governing
noun is pronounced, as it were, in one breath with the genitive that
follows it; its vowels are shortened, and its case-terminations tend to
disappear. Thus in Assyrian, while _śarru rabu_ is “great king,” _śar
rabi_ is “king of great ones,” and in Hebrew the construct _dhiv’rê
hâ’âm_, “words of the people,” stands in marked contrast to the simple
_dhĕvârim_, “words.”
The agglutinative languages of Western Asia, again, traversed an
altogether different road. In the Accadian of ancient Chaldea, we still
find instances in the oldest inscriptions of a genitive by position,
which only differs from an adjective by the meaning it bears. Thus,
_lugal calga_ is “strong king,” _lugal’Uru_, “king of Ur.” But a
postposition soon came to be added to the second substantive in order
to point out more distinctly its place in the sentence, and these
postpositions seem originally to have been verbs. At all events, such is
the case with one of the postpositions, _lal_, used for the genitive;
_lugal ’Uru-lal_, for instance, being literally “king Ur-filling,” though
the more usual postposition -_na_ has lost all traces of its source and
derivation. The latter postposition is found throughout the Ural-Altaic
family, as in the Turkish _evin_, “of a house,” or the Votiak _murten_,
“by a man.” It indicates the genitive in Finnish and Lapp, in Mordvin and
Samoyed, in Mongol (-_yin_, -_un_), and Mantschu (-_ni_). It is somewhat
remarkable that though the Ural-Altaic family is characterized by the
use of postpositions, that is, by making the defining word follow that
which it defines, the modern dialects, with a few exceptions,[275] have
discarded the general rule and placed the adjective before its noun.
This change of position must be ascribed to a wish for differentiation,
when the employment of a special postposition for the genitival relation
had familiarized the speaker with the distinction between adjective and
genitive. Elsewhere the distinction was brought into relief by the help
of special words or symbols to denote the genitive relation. Just as
the Accadians or the Finns employed a postposition which was originally
an independent word with a meaning of its own, so, too, the Semites
replaced the “construct state” by the insertion of the demonstrative or
relative pronoun, _śarru sa rabi_, for example, literally “king that
(is) the great ones,” coming to signify simply “king of the great ones,”
and the Chinese assigned the same office to their _tchi_, “place.”
The analytic languages of modern Europe have followed in the same
track, only employing prepositions like _de_, _of_, or _von_, instead
of demonstrative pronouns or other words. When the conception of the
genitive had once been clearly recognized, means were soon found for
making it as clear in phonetic expression as it was in idea, and the
ambiguous machinery of flection was superseded by a method of expression
which had been familiar to the more advanced Ural-Altaic idioms from a
very remote period.